Right across the street from my apartment building is another apartment building whose first floor houses a little mom-and-pop tobacco shop. The shop is flanked by vending machines selling coffee, tea, juice, cigarettes, even steamy cans of corn soup -- a veritable oasis glowing in the night. Japanese vending machines offer an amazing array of beverages hot and cold, and there's also the odd machine selling vegetables, eggs, milk, or plastic work gloves. Why not, after all? Open 24 hours a day and situated every couple of hundred meters on almost every street, they even have the ubiquitous convenience store beat for convenience (except when you're out and about and dying of thirst on a hot summer day, in which case a vending machine will inevitably be impossible to find).
The coffee-and-cigarettes combination is a common one. Here's another location, another pair. Japan does have an age limit for smoking, and I assume the machines have some means of checking the purchaser's ID, but for all I know it could be on the honor system. Having never tried to buy either alcohol or tobacco from a machine, I can't say exactly how it works, but it's a fact that vending machines sell both.
Coca Cola has come a long way from its Atlanta origins, and some of its innovations for the Japanese market are fascinating. Besides the usual sodas, there are hot cans of "Georgia" brand coffee (you can tell whether the item is hot or cold by the red or blue color beneath it), a whole line of different green teas in bottles, and the sports drink Aquarius (its Japanese competitor is called Pocari Sweat -- so appetizing!). Vending machines only offer hot drinks in the colder months, from about October to March. A warm can of coffee is a wonderful hand-warmer, and the sweet, milky types are quite tasty in a sugary way. The black coffee is fairly mild and a bit metallic from the can. But the bottled green teas are one of the reasons to love Japan. Unsweetened, they're cool, refreshing, and have just the right balance of bitterness and grassiness. But whatever beverage you're in the mood to drink, in Tokyo you can probably find it in a vending machine not far away.
Right across the street from my apartment building is another apartment building whose first floor houses a little mom-and-pop tobacco shop. The shop is flanked by vending machines selling coffee, tea, juice, cigarettes, even steamy cans of corn soup -- a veritable oasis glowing in the night. Japanese vending machines offer an amazing array of beverages hot and cold, and there's also the odd machine selling vegetables, eggs, milk, or plastic work gloves. Why not, after all? Open 24 hours a day and situated every couple of hundred meters on almost every street, they even have the ubiquitous convenience store beat for convenience (except when you're out and about and dying of thirst on a hot summer day, in which case a vending machine will inevitably be impossible to find).
The coffee-and-cigarettes combination is a common one. Here's another location, another pair. Japan does have an age limit for smoking, and I assume the machines have some means of checking the purchaser's ID, but for all I know it could be on the honor system. Having never tried to buy either alcohol or tobacco from a machine, I can't say exactly how it works, but it's a fact that vending machines sell both.
Coca Cola has come a long way from its Atlanta origins, and some of its innovations for the Japanese market are fascinating. Besides the usual sodas, there are hot cans of "Georgia" brand coffee (you can tell whether the item is hot or cold by the red or blue color beneath it), a whole line of different green teas in bottles, and the sports drink Aquarius (its Japanese competitor is called Pocari Sweat -- so appetizing!). Vending machines only offer hot drinks in the colder months, from about October to March. A warm can of coffee is a wonderful hand-warmer, and the sweet, milky types are quite tasty in a sugary way. The black coffee is fairly mild and a bit metallic from the can. But the bottled green teas are one of the reasons to love Japan. Unsweetened, they're cool, refreshing, and have just the right balance of bitterness and grassiness. But whatever beverage you're in the mood to drink, in Tokyo you can probably find it in a vending machine not far away.
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